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Father Hugh Barbour takes on the growing Marian Consecration movement and explains its theological roots. What is consecration and can one really consecrate oneself to Mary?
Is Marian consecration, anything more than just a pious practice? Fr. Hugh Barbour is next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers Podcast for living, understanding and defending your Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett your host. And as everybody knows, Christians are divided over the person of Mary and over how to honor her and all that, and Catholics are in one camp and many other Christians are in other camps in regard to that. But within the Catholic church, there’s quite a bit of division over Mary as well. And with this growing movement, really a flowering movement of consecration to Mary there’s a whole section of the church, that’s very fired up about this and very enthusiastic about it. And there’s a whole other section who looks, shall we say askance at all this Marian consecration, wondering if it’s not just maybe a piety gone too far or piety disconnected from the meat of the matter, the soul of the church and particularly from the person of Jesus. So we thought we’d ask our resident expert on all things liturgical and on all Holy things and that his Fr. Hugh Barbour, who joins us now with some explanation and some of the theology behind Marian consecration.
Cy Kellett:
I think a lot of people have a problem with consecration to Mary. And I’m going to start there and then we’ll get into what… But here’s the problem. One, it’s not Jesus, and there is this everything-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
She’s not Jesus.
Cy Kellett:
She’s not Jesus. Right. But it’s not consecration to Jesus. And two, with-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Gender neutral language, okay, she’s not Jesus-
Cy Kellett:
She’s not [inaudible 00:01:42], we don’t want to be gender neutral with the mother of God.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
No we don’t.
Cy Kellett:
But okay. So, but it’s not about Jesus-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
You’re the first person service person I ever heard call Our Lady it.
Cy Kellett:
I wasn’t saying Our Lady is it I was saying the act-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Maybe when she was a little baby, you call-
Cy Kellett:
It’s not directed apparently at least when we say consecration to Mary, maybe you’re going to straighten that out. But the other thing is we have no idea what the word consecration means. What does that mean concentration to?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, this is an important topic. And of course, but that’s not the most important aspect of the topic. The use of the word, whatever you call it, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So you could call it other things.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
The term consecration comes in mostly in the 17th century with St. John Eudes, the French saint-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I didn’t know it came with him-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And with the Eude, who promoted the devotions of this to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Sacred Heart of Mary, as they said back then this sacred. And then of course later was St. Louis de Montfort.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And then the Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, thank you. You made the show much fancy.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
I know fancy, fancy, fancy, although he wasn’t as fancy as the French accent. But that was all part of what was called the French school of spirituality that included the Sulpicians, Fr. Oriel and then later on various other luminaries in that particular school.
Cy Kellett:
Is it fair to say very affective school of mainly Catholic?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
I wouldn’t say that. I will get to it in a minute, but the point is the word consecration was used by those men, especially John Eudes and Louis de Montfort in a particular way. Which St. John Paul II, tried to vary so that it could be understood more easily by everyone. And so he kept using the term entrustment.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Entrustment, affidamento in Italian.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
All right. So that means giving everything over to someone else. But the word consecration in Catholic theology, and I really don’t like to question what has become a term in popular devotion. And I’m perfectly happy to say consecrate yourself to Mary, it’s a perfectly good expression, but probably the word entrustment is more precise. And we scholastic, we like precise.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Consecration has an expression that is meant for such things which are given over to God, in the service of God, liturgically especially in him only. So you have the consecration of a church, consecration of an altar, and even current Canon law, the consecration of a Bishop, because the priestly ordination was the consecration parcismus. This person is set aside for the worship of God. And bells used to be consecrated with chrism. They got rid of that in the new right, or you can still do it. Because of course, bells are so important in day-to-day life. That was like a sort of audible Holy hour for the-
Cy Kellett:
And others just recordings. So they can’t conscript.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Audible Holy water for the people. And we had them at a new abbey, we’ve got beautiful new bells, wonderful bronze bells, but the word consecration is fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. Use it all you want. Don’t let anyone tell you can’t use it, but use it in the back of your mind with this notion entrustment. It’s like, I’m giving everything over to you for you to take care of it. Because as we know in our lives, not everything is Holy. Not everything is directed divine worship, not everything is out of this world, it’s in this world. And so not everything is sacred. And we consecrate ourselves to Our Lady in that terminology. We entrust ourselves to her, even those aspects of her life, which seemed to have nothing to do with religion or the practice of religion. Everything like your mother, your mother taught you the Catholic faith, but she also got you up in the morning, got to the bathroom, made you brush your teeth, give him breakfast and made sure you’d done your lessons in my old fashioned English and sent you off to school.
Cy Kellett:
She showed me how to get my breakfast.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Or kept you at school now. Oh please. What is that?
Cy Kellett:
I’m just playing. I’m sorry.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Jesus forgive you, your mother was much more attentive than that. I’m sure. And… Gosh. Anyway, the point is, is that your mother takes care of you on so many levels. And she also says your morning prayers, or especially your night prayers with you and the family, you’re praying the rosary and she gets you to mass in Sunday, that is every aspect of your life is entrusted to her. She takes care of you.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And so the consecration of Our Lady needs to be understood, first of all, in that basic, simple light of our relationship to our mother. And then we will be able once we understand that, to understand the broader, deeper, and more permanent mystical, theological revealed aspects of this idea of consecration durability or entrustment to Our Lady.
Cy Kellett:
That is very helpful too. A natural analogy for a supernatural reality is very, very helpful. So we have a natural mother and we’re entrusting ourselves to Mary as our supernatural mother.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
But we do entrust even that complete consecration to Our Lady or absolute or total as I like to use the term.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
As St. John Paul II, motto under his coat of arms is Totus Tuus [foreign language 00:07:10]. That is, I am all yours of Mary, and everything I have is yours. That totality means that you’re consecrating to her everything that you have. That is even the natural stuff.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Is natural supernatural distinction is all fine for theology, but in day-to-day practice, if you want to serve God and love him, you need to eat breakfast for the love of God, whatever you do, whether you eat or drink to offer the glory of God as St. Paul says, and then everything else should do besides. So I’m only making this distinction to say, consecration has a specific liturgical religious priestly significance you almost would say. But entrustment makes it clear that everybody’s just giving over whatever aspects of the lives can be given over. And that’s everything practically to Our Lady. So that’s why John Paul II preferred that term.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. So did this idea of entrusting oneself to Mary did it originate in France or is it an ancient idea that is elaborated on by these French teachers or?
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, it’s an ancient idea because it comes from the heart of Christ and we see it in the gospels where he says, son, behold, your mother, mother, behold, your son. That is him, trusted her to his beloved disciple, his closest friend among the apostles. And he entrusted that apostle his closest friend to his blessed mother. So he accomplished the consecration if you will, to Mary and Mary to the soul, because she’s also committed from the wood of the cross, giving her to him and him to her. And that was an entrustment because she was going to be a widow in Israel with no husband and with only one son and the son died. So the widowed mother with no offspring, that’s like the nightmare image in ancient Israel. Someone’s got to take care of you. You’re going to depend on the charity of others because the culture, even though it was religious, still women were dependent upon the fact that they had men to take care of them, if they were virtuous women.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And so consequently, our Lord saw to it that he performed the function that his natural eternal father performs in taking care of Mary as his creature. But by moving him to then entrust her to his closest friend in the absence of his earthly father St. Joseph. And so our Lord is performing at the very end, the last great work of charity, he performs is taking the place of St. Joseph and saying, okay, now I’ve taken care of you since Joseph died. Now I’m giving it over to John.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
So our Lord was scrupulous observant of the fourth commandment and of the need for his mother to have a social public guardian.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
So Joseph was the guardian. Jesus was the guardian, and now John was a guardian. But that had to do with a mutual entrustment because our Lord was more than aware of Our Lady’s moral and spiritual superiority to the one to whom he had given her.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And that’s a very important aspect of it. So it comes from there, but if you want to go even further and more deeply, you have to consider that the way in which creation comes forth from God is the way it comes back to God. And this is making a big jump, but just consider this, that anyone who performs any particular work or function in the world, performs it for an end or a purpose. And that end of purpose is the highest thing in the line of their own activity. So if you start a business, say you want to open a restaurant. And so everything you do is ordered towards that, the excellence of the staff, the location, the calculations about your possible business and all that. Of course, now it’s practically a dead letter, you can’t open a restaurant nowadays.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
If you wanted to, you’d probably be shut down, but any case, but you get my end that the purpose of the work is shown forth in the final end or goal. Now, for all of us, the highest end we have in mind is the reason why we’re doing anything. So like the guy that wants to open a restaurant or an auto dealership, or whatever it might be, or just survive, what’s he doing it for? For his family, that they be peaceful and happy and taken care of and able to accomplish those things in life, which human beings need to accomplish. That is you do it for that end.
Even the guy that wanted to start a restaurant, if someone told him, look, this is going to ruin and destroy your family because no one else wants to do it. Try to find another line of work. If you were wise, he would say, okay, we’re going to do something else. Because his main goal is to take care of the people that God confided to him. And so God, in creating the universe, the highest being the most noble being, the most noble creature that he made ever would be the one for which he made everything else. And so who is that most noble creature?
Cy Kellett:
Mary.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Mary, exactly. Because Jesus is not strictly speaking a creature. He’s God who took himself a human nature. So there’s that creative aspect of his experience-
Cy Kellett:
But as a person, he is not.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
But as a person he is not a creature. So even for God, he needs to have that highest being in all creation that could explain why he did everything else. And the mother of God is that one higher than the Seraphim, more glorious in the chair of him, beyond all the heights of heaven, beyond all the angels and saints, absolutely beyond all of them is Our Lady. And so she’s the reason why he made everything and the reason through whom he recreates what he made and brings it back to him. So when we profess in the creed that we believe in his only begotten son, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, be God not made, of one substance with the father, through him, all things were made. Okay. There it is. That’s all the divinity. Who was incarnate by the Holy spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made man, and for us men in our salvation came down from heaven. That’s the point. So he came down to save us through her.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And so we come back to him through her and that’s [crosstalk 00:13:53] one of the cross.
Cy Kellett:
That’s beautiful.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
That’s the highest thing God made in order for us to come forth from him is the reason why we come back to him.
Cy Kellett:
Yes. Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And if you think of your own father and mother in their ideal relationship, if not the real one, why does your dad love you? Because he loves your mother.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And why does he want your happiness? Because he wants her happiness. That’s a natural comparison, but consecration of Our Lady or entrustment to her means that you are deliberately and intentionally relating all your life. All your thoughts, words, deeds, actions, omissions, possessions, accomplishments, whatever it might be through her for the end, for which God created you. It’s a gift to her, you entrust it to her most securely, because if you are relating your whole life to the very reason why God made the world, that most beautiful and marvelous thing for which he made it, then you’re securely anchoring your existence.
Cy Kellett:
You a little journey to get there. That was really worth it to go on that journey.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
No, I’m sorry. You were looking a little cross-eyed there for a moment.
Cy Kellett:
No, no. Well, no, I didn’t know where this was going.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
We want security.
Cy Kellett:
It comes to something really beautiful.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
We want to found ourselves in the right place. And God himself could not find a better way to come to us than through the blessed mother. And we can find no better way to return to him than through her.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
And that gives us a tremendous security, you have our Protestant brethren to talk about assurance of salvation. Okay. Well, we have St. Alphonsus who says, “You’ll be assured of salvation, if you come back to God the same way he came to you through Mary.”
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Like that.
Cy Kellett:
So that’s what this is all about.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. Exactly. It’s not Mariolatry which is ridiculous.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Totally ridiculous. That they’d say that, never been the case, but anyway.
Cy Kellett:
Well, it’s… No, right. It’s not, but the thing can look like something to someone who doesn’t see some-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Look someone who never had a normal Christian form of worship.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Even human formal worship. Where the no images, the no gestures, there’s no water, there’s no scent there, no flowers. There’s nothing. Okay. It’s just a bear lectern and some pews. And they were allowed to have music, but barely.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Even then some of them didn’t want it. They didn’t want instruments, that’s like bad. So basically it’s a strip down version of salvation that is a kind of clastic. And therefore they think that somehow anything that’s visual or can be imagined, or is human, or is able to be sensed is somehow idolatrous, but it’s not.
Cy Kellett:
But to come back to him, through the same path that he came to us, is very simple and makes very true sense of with. And so we come to Jesus through Mary, the same that he came to us through Mary.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Right. Exactly.
Cy Kellett:
And so, okay. So this act of entrustment then-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Or consecration, if you will.
Cy Kellett:
Consecration to Mary. Yeah. Well, if I may just take a little church side trip, because the woman who asked us to do this podcast also asks is this similar to consecration to Joseph? Because you see now people consecrate themselves. And it seems to me that it’s not similar.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Well, no in this sense that no one matches Mary in the universality of her influence.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Because even Joseph gets this grace is through her. And so if you’re entrusting yourself to Joseph, you’re really in trusting yourself to Mary. Just like, if you can trust yourself to Jesus, his original consecration is consecration of the Sacred Heart. Well, that’s easy to understand.
Cy Kellett:
Sure.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Because it’s the savior.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Everything I have belongs to you Jesus, that’s not very hard for anybody to understand.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
But let’s say we shouldn’t exaggerate or overdo this particular tendency because it’s basically a moral act whereby we entrust and give everything we… But remember, we’ll forget, we’ll be distracted, but consecrate yourself to the Sacred Heart, consecrate yourself to the Immaculate heart or to any other invocation for St. Louis de Montfort, its consecration to Jesus. The eternal wisdom at the hands of his mother, the concentration of Mary actually says, Jesus is the eternal wisdom. His theme is always the wisdom of God, which is what I’ve been talking about, is first or ultimate ideal in creating the world. That’s what wisdom does it orders things to an end. And then we consecrate ourselves to that one. And therefore we’re consecrated to eternal wisdom. And the liturgy identifies Our Lady with wisdom. I wish we kept more of that, but we didn’t because it’s not very visual. That’s the problem. A hardest visual. So-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
So Sacred Heart, Immaculate Heart, St. Joseph, your angel, whatever it is. But if you consecrate yourself to them, they will not forget.
Cy Kellett:
I can testify to this Father. I know that, that’s true.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
You might forget but they won’t.
Cy Kellett:
That’s exactly right. And the consecration to Mary, some years ago, my wife and I made a consecration when everyone was reading the book, the newer version, not the-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
I don’t know. I did it ages ago in 1976 with the Fr. Faber’s translation.
Cy Kellett:
In all things you perceive me in the faith Father.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
But I’m saying I don’t know all of these new things.
Cy Kellett:
It’s very hard to describe to a person what that has meant in our lives, in our married life. And not because of anything that we’ve done, but because of the constant reminder that she is in fact, taking care of us. Constant. Almost to the point where you can’t…
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Even, should we forget. She will not forget.
Cy Kellett:
She doesn’t forget.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
No.
Cy Kellett:
No, indeed she doesn’t forget. So this is an effective thing as well. I’m not saying it certainly doesn’t like take away suffering or something like that, but no, it opens up everything as a means to God in a way that nothing else I can describe does.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
No. And I think that’s why it’s very important that everyone listening to this should make the intention to entrust him or herself to Our Lady or consecrate himself or herself to Our Lady. And don’t worry about all the details, use St. Louis de Montfort formulary, use St. John Eudes formulary, use no formulary whatsoever, but prepare for a little bit for a week or two weeks or St. Louis de Montfort is four weeks, whatever, but just prepare with a little meditation and prayer. And we’re coming up in Advent all the way to Christmas. Yeah. And so we have a feast at conception and Lady Guadalupe, so we can relate our prayer life in this season, the most Marian of seasons to that end and just do it. You don’t need to have a priest would be nice. You don’t need to get your confessor’s permission.
That’s lovely. Thank you very much, sister. No, I do not need to have permission to entrust myself to Our Lady from anyone. Okay. I don’t. Jesus already said that on the cross. He said it. So let’s just not be so… What they’re worried about there is that people might exaggerate. Well, of course, Marian devotion always has exaggerations that’s because the devil likes to give it a bad name. And so we avoid the exaggerations and just say, look, she’s my mother. And she’s going to take care of me. I’m giving myself to her. And she will bring me to eternal life safely and securely because she brought eternal life to me. And that’s all there is to it. So the devil can just go take a hike. She’s always there.
Cy Kellett:
I honestly, Father feel like there was more questions I was going to ask you, but I’m so impressed. This is going to sound hokey, but it really, I don’t know, grabbed my imagination the way you described it. And now I feel like… Was there other stuff I was supposed to ask you? Was I supposed to ask you-
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
I don’t know. The Immaculate Conception Our Lady Guadalupe and any of the feast coming up. I was just saying the season is nice, Advent and this two Marian feasts.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Those are perfect for everybody to consider this matter in any way. Even if you don’t consecrate yourself to Our Lady, you still are. You just don’t know it.
Cy Kellett:
No. Right. But having a thing be said is very important.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Very important.
Cy Kellett:
It’s not nothing.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
We’re intelligent beings. We need to have a little food for the mind, as well as for the heart.
Cy Kellett:
Will you give us your blessing before we end.
Fr. Hugh Barbour:
Beatae Maria Virginae…(prayer in Latin)
Cy Kellett:
Amen. Thank you Father.
As always Fr. Hugh finding it in Thomas Aquinas or using Aquinas to help us to understand the theology underneath many of the practices of the church. Very, very enlightening. I have to be honest with you, I was already a big fan of Marian consecration, but now I feel like I have a way of connecting to it theologically, that I did not have before language for doing that. I hope you feel the same way. However, you might feel about it you’re always welcome to email us at focus@catholic.com. That’s our email address. Focus@catholic.com, send us your comments, your complaints, maybe there’s something you’d like us to get into that we haven’t gotten into on this topic or another, we would love to hear from you.
Wherever you get this podcast, would you please subscribe so that you’ll be notified when new episodes of Focus are available, whether you listen on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else. And if you watch us on YouTube, that’s growing, we’re very happy about growing on YouTube. And if you’re one of the folks who has found us on YouTube and watches, if you would like and subscribe, that also helps us to grow this podcast. You can support us financially, and we do need your financial support by visiting us at givecatholic.com, givecatholic.com. Thanks again joining us here at Catholic Answers Focus. I’m Cy Kellett your host, and I hope we’ll see you next time, now that you’ve subscribed.